by Martha Morgan, St. Johns Country Day School
In this WebQuest, students will individually research global warming and characteristics of one of six major land biomes: rainforest, taiga, grassland, desert, tundra, or temperate broadleaf deciduous forest in order to design and create PowerPoint slides to share with others. Students will also collaborate in small groups to compile a database of biome characteristics using Excel and reach a team decision about which biome is likely to be most affected by global warming. Finally, teams will debate this issue.
Teacher Introduction
This project is designed to be completed over 8-10 classroom periods. It is recommended that the teacher make group assignments based on various skill and ability levels. Having a classroom computer projector is very helpful for showing and discussing the Web Quest, the Think Sheet, and the rubric. The template (click here to see the template I created) for the database is easy to construct and save in a templates folder for use by all groups.